1. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch)(Adventure)2. Final Fight [Japanese Version] (Switch)(Beat 'Em Up)3. Ziggurat (PC)(FPS)
4. Magrunner: Dark Pulse (PC)(FPS)
5. The King of Dragons [Japanese](Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)6. Captain Commando [Japanese](Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)7. Knights of the Round [Japanese](Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)
8. The Witcher (PC)(RPG)9. Tenchi wo Kurau II (Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)
10. Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (PC)(RPG)11. Lichdom: Battlemage (PC)(FPS/RPG Hybrid)
12. Star Wars: Republic Commando (PC)(FPS)13. DOOM 64 (PC)(FPS)
14. Half Dead 2 (PC)(Adventure)15. Powered Gear - Strategic Variant Armor Equipment (Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)
16. Torchlight II (PC)(RPG)17. Battle Circuit [Japanese](Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)
18. Hard Reset Redux (PC)(FPS)19. The Stanley Parable (PC)(Walking Sim)20. Waking Mars (PC)(Adventure)
21. Requiem: Avenging Angel (PC)(FPS)22. Night Slashers (Arcade)(Beat 'Em Up)
23. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD (PC)(Action Adventure)24. Strikers 1945 (Arcade)(SHMUP)
25. SiN Episodes: Emergence (PC)(FPS)
26. Crysis Warhead (PC)(FPS)It was a productive day.
Strikers 1945I remember first encountering this in a run down dollar movie theater, then later in a couple of malls, restaurants, and even once in a weird hole in the wall arcade in South Korea. There is something wonderous about finding it in the wild, because as much as I love my fighters and beat 'em ups, something about Strikers 1945 just felt
pure, as if this is exactly what the arcade was about: bright colors, incredible visuals, intense gameplay, and lots of explosions. Hell yeah, I was hooked.
Strikers 1945 is a vertical shooter, and it's probably the game that built my vert preference the most. Look, I am absolutely terrible at the SHMUP genre, but I still have preferences, including verts over horis. In S45, you pick a plane, based on real world aircraft from World War 2, and then you go up against a random level order of super tanks, ultimate battleships, and giant robots. Clear those, and you inevitably find yourself launching into outer space to take down a few randomized bosses and giant alien robot crabs. Yeah, that went in a direction I wasn't expecting.
While the planes all represent the various aircraft of WW2, you do get some interesting options, including a Japanese Zero and a German Bf 109. Each plane has a different style of attack, different bombs for large attacks and negating enemy projectiles, and different charge attacks. As you play, you can grab weapon powerups for more firepower, though touching an enemy will knock you back one and being hit with an enemy projectile will make you lose everything.
Stages are generally short, as the boss fight is the big ticket affair. Still, with so many planes, the random rotation of early levels, and the randomized bosses you fight later, there is a lot of replay. As the levels get modified to become more challenging through the rotation, it can also present more surprises for the 1CC crowd, so if you're a fan of that, you have a fun challenge ahead.
SiN Episodes: EmergenceI'm not a big fan of the original SiN and have yet to get around to finishing it, but as I had been given this sequel for free, I decided I'd jump back in. Emergence has a strange history; meant to be the first of a nine-part episodic series the way the additional Half-Life 2 chapters eventually became, it didn't earn enough money to save the developer from being bought out and turned into a casual mobile gaming developer. It's an experiment in game design that has since proven successful, but now it sits in its own space, a single entry in a series that never manifested.
The game playa like if Half-Life 2 were imagined through the ideas of Duke Nukem 3D. It's full of cultural parodies, it encourages running fast, and it's got way bigger T&A than HL2 ever did. The version of Alex here is sporting an obvious thing and a firm ass, and let's just say the major villain was modeled off a fetish model that I am...*ahem*...familiar with.
Anyway, since this was the beginning of a series and not a full game, you only get three weapons: a pistol, weirdly accurate shotgun, and an assault rifle that kicks like a mule unless you look down the scope. Each has an alternate fire, though their usefulness is situational. None of them feel great, but the shotgun became my general workhorse until I realized I had to zoom in to make the assault rifle worth using.
You know what else this game has? Secrets...which feel really out of place considering how similar the game's backbone is to the Half-Life 2 Source engine. In fact the devs built on Source and added some solid enhancements. For instance, in the base Source engine, an object is effectively made of a single material, regardless of what it is. So a car is roughly "metal" regardless of whether you shoot the frame, wheels, or windshield. Emergence improved this so that each area could behave differently. It's not necessarily noticeable, but when you know it's there, it's a very nice little addition.
Unfortunately, another addition was called "adaptive difficulty." The crux is that, no matter your skill level, the game will adapt. The idea is to make a playthrough take just as long for a novice as it does an FPS master. In practice, this means the game just throws enemy spawns at you over and over again, and usually the tougher variety. For me, it meant I ended up facing off against hordes of heavily armored enemies with miniguns. Lots of miniguns... But you can throw the whole thing off by rushing, which stops a lot of the extra spawns.
Look, at best, SiN Episodes: Emergence is an experiment. It's a curiosity piece at best, only really worth tracking down for those who want to see about the curious offshoots in FPS history. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.
Crysis WarheadCrysis was a weird game, a combination of tech showpiece and pseudo-tactical gameplay from the developers of Far Cry. It also went off the rails in the same way, introducing a frustrating new enemy type that feels radically out of place about midway through the game. Here it's aliens, and it tanked the experience.
Crysis Warhead is technically an expansion, but it's standalone. It does a better job of introducing the aliens earlier in the experience, making for a better experience over the base game. You also get a continual back and forth between aliens and human enemies that feels significantly improved and balanced. And then you get the main character, a knock off of Jason Statham. He's angry, he sounds like a British gangster, and he calls people "muppet." His call sign is Psycho. It fits how I shot a lot of dudes in the face.
It's a short game, but it features a good mixture of narrow corridors and open spaces to fight in, vehicular and rail levels, and areas that you can choose how to approach however you want. One level where I had to hit some docks with a submarine, I kept getting warnings about troops on the road. What did I do? I instead hit a beach and swam around to the docks. Exactly how I wanted to do it. The first guy who saw me never even got a chance to fire his gun before I put a bullet in his face. Good times.
Crysis and Crysis Warhead feel like they're tactical FPS games that just don't quite lean tactically enough. Yet despite this, Warhead also feels like the lessons from the base game had been learned. It improves on some of what I didn't like about the original, and while it still isn't quite where I want it to be in full tactical territory, it's a solid enough entry in its own right. I'd rather play this than Crysis or, hell, Far Cry.
